Rejected Materials is a collaborative project by J.K. Bergstrand Dooley. The project was presented in an exhibition at at Tiroler Kunstpavillon Innsbruck and consists of a workshop, installation and performance. The sculptures were produced during a communal workshop at Buchsenhausen, and first installed in our bedroom, so we had to live with the objects and make them part of our routines and everyday life. Some of the material included fruit and vegetable seeds – detritis from our own meals – which also started growing into plants.

When the sculptures and plants had grown together within the frame of the residency, they were presented in an installation. The installation tried to unveil the our rejected materials but also the hidden cleaned out materials of Tiroler Kunstpavillon and Buchsenhausen. Presented as part of the installation was also a monologue. The monologue was a list of material, like one gets after the title of an artwork, but in an expanded sense. In it we tried to cover everything that was included in the production of the work. It was an attempt that had to fail. The impossibility to comprehensively detail everything that went into producing the things in the gallery. It was an attempt to make present what is absent; a bit like conjuring the ghost of the object – giving space to all that was lurking behind out working: our pact, our failures, our embarrassments and struggles (see video for monologue).

[DELETE: I AM A REJECTED MATERIAL
I AM A SCHIZO REJECTED MATERIAL
REJECTED MATERIALS
COMPOST WITH WHICH TO MAKE SOIL
WHAT WE MADE IT FROM]

INTRO
The following is A WAY OF LETTING OUT THE SHIT OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS, AND HOPEFULLY OF ALSO TURNING IT INTO SOIL, which would be a way of turning that which troubles, depresses and disturbs us into joyful rebellion.
It takes the form of a list of materials, like you get after the title of an art work, but in an expanded sense. It will try to cover everything that was included as well as excluded, it might be about absence defining presence or something like that. An attempt (that must fail) to be comprehensive about exactly what went into producing these things in front of you, a sort of presently absent presence, a ghost! A specter! It’s a specter that tries to see all the shit and dirt that goes into producing a space as clean as this one. We will work backwards and hopefully the world will turn upside down in the process.

TEASER TRAILER / A KIND OF PROLOGUE
I screwed
and I screwed
and I screwed
and I screwed up

POTENTIAL TITLES OF THIS THING:

THE RESIDENCY EVIL
A HOLIDAY FROM UNEMPLOYED LIFE
HAUNTOLOGY OF REJECTED MATERIALS
WHO I AM, AND WHAT I LOST
a.k.a WHAT I DID IN INNSBRUCK DURING THE RESIDENCY PERIOD

I screwed
and I screwed
and I screwed
and I fucked up

I keep fucking up

My girlfriend is in the process of dumping me for someone else who is taller and has a lot more money
She said she needs someone bigger and stronger than me
I have to move out of our flat, I’ve been paying about 400 euros per month on it while I’ve been here. That’s more than half of the amount I receive for being here.
I’ve been travelling by train to visit her as much as possible
I am earning less than no money, and it’s all my fault
Because I have been pretending to be an emerging artist, instead of recognising, like the unemployment office told me, that it’s not really what I am, what I am is a potential cleaner or construction worker. I cut my hand, I pissed off my lover. Nobody wants to employ me. On top of all that, I had saved a bit of money but there’s a high chance that the taxman will take it away.
I collected hundreds of seeds from the food I ate, many of them died, I’m not the best gardener (but I know who is). Now I’m sitting with the survivors.

This goes out in solidarity to my two colleagues WHO GOT FIRED 2 DAYS AGO, and all my friends who do care work and have 3 jobs, and are pulling pints for overly drunk people, answering calls, who struggle with their art practice, who don’t sell and don’t get grants, who probably applied to this fucking residency, like I did, I was rejected too, but I made a pact so I was accepted at the same time. Collectively I’ve been through both acceptance and rejection, just like we all collectively do every day, although maybe rejection takes the larger share.

All of you out there with a drive towards depression, suicidal tho, destructive relationships, death, it is a drive showing us that something has gone very very wrong, it isn’t meant to be like this, it probably doesn’t have to be like this, we are driven to becoming mud, becoming compost, becoming soil, there’s power in our powerlessness. Needs to be formed.

Anyway some things got lost, whatever, it’s not really important

I was going to talk about residences, residencies, homes, haunts, ghosts and rejected materials, I will do it.

HAUNT

I did a residency, I resided in a place that was provided as a home. I did the housework there, and I pretended to do artwork there as well. We talked a lot about artwork and housework. We had the idea that everything is haunted, not so much in the classical sense, but in a weird Marxist way where the dead energy of workers lives on within products, ghosts of dead labour. I am a product like that too, the product of housework, and education and so on. The artists here are products as well, products of institutions and academies, themselves the products of cultural city branding, who are the products NOTE add!
and we are haunted by the work that produced us. The energy I have to talk, my voice, is a haunted product too, a kind of amplifier of various influences, including the fact that I didn’t write this speech, and especially because this is being recorded and will repeat here, technology multiplying ghosts, so haunting increases. ‘Haunt’ originally meant: ‘to provide with a home’, the haunt, where you live, a place of production and reproduction, das unheimliche Ort, the haunted unhomely place, so haunt signifies both the dwelling place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it.

Home is where the haunt is.

Residency is the potential of the residency evil.

RESIDENCES

So let’s cut it off, dust it off and clean it up – separate ‘The Residency’, the strange place inhabited by half visible, semi-permeable phantom figures called ‘artists’, who must love their work and mostly do it for free, separate it from that which comes before, between and after, lack of health insurance, no money, general insecurity, never gonna get a pension. We get a shiny product like this exhibition, a phenomena wrapped in cling film, one that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, like something isn’t right. What happens if we follow an opposite logic, instead of cleaning and tidying, like I’ve done as well, we could just dwell on the dirt, not cut off the final product from the processes that led us there. That would very simply be to allow our daily life struggles, depression, lack of money, love lives, etc. into the exhibition space. Funding will probably dry up very quickly, and we’ll be submerging artists soon, so we stand before a contradiction, do it clean and suffer in silence, or become dirty and stop doing art, become art drop outs. There isn’t an answer, just a contradiction.

Maybe there’s a way to walk a line along it, and maybe in that sense collectivity matters, but it doesn’t feel like it matters here, even though we seem to be a group of people communicating that to you. Does collectivity matter? What is the matter with collectivity? What is the matter of collectivity?

It’s hard for me to say, because I never really feel like one person. When I applied for this program I made a pact with myself, if one part of me got in it would open the door for the other, I multiplied my multiple selves to stand a better chance. We all applied together, but in the end I still haven’t been paid. Let’s add this then to the title of what you are looking at, collectivity doesn’t matter, but matter matters.

200 people applied to be here, to spend 4 months away from home earning money below the poverty line, 4 people got it, we take a step forward, one step closer to visibility, to ending the period of emergence, and just being ‘artists’ without being young or emerging but fully established powerful people. The phenomenology of the Residency fails though, it isn’t a whole thing, it’s a temporary status, something that happens between all the other mess of life, so it needs to be reconnected, connected with rejected materials.

I AM REJECTED MATERIAL

The following is the list of materials, this will take a little while so feel free to leave

1. Big ladder, small ladder, climbing up them and down them, nearly falling off them. Trying to metaphorically throw them away [TAKE LADDER AWAY]

2. Energy, from food made in crazy working conditions by super exploited workers, and from sleeping and many other factors, like mental well-being, this material is very often just Low-Energy. Used to climb the ladder, and to sit here, to talk.

3. Clothes I’m wearing, my special extra loud shirt for openings, the one pair of trousers that I have with me.

4. Wood that I’m sitting on.

5. Words, being written now by me [but also not actually me!], in a dark room in the basement of the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, partly in bed, partly at a desk, between 12 and 10 pm. It is sunny outside, and I don’t feel motivated to write, I have other things to do and problems to deal with.

6. Absence of the glass ceiling, hands cut on the sharp edges, blood. Lots of sweat moving them, and putting them down there where you are.

7. Technology: laptop, phone, audio device, video camera, etc. These words will become a video, it will run through a computer made by the company apple, now famous for having a mass of angry, depressed and suicidal producers who work for their subsidiary company Foxconn in China. Foxconn have now installed suicide nets at their factories, a month ago workers began jumping from their dorm rooms.